The UGC had informed that it will soon release a set of parameters to evaluate instances of self-plagiarism or recycling of text soon.

To improve India’s position in research, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has come up with yet another circular. This time the Commission is warning about ‘self-plagiarism’ where one copies of ‘recycles’ text from one’s own previous work. Earlier, several guidelines from the Ministry of Human Resource Development and UGC have warned of plagiarism in research.

In the recent notice, the UGC had said “reproducing, in part or whole, of one’s own previously published work without adequate citation and proper acknowledgment and claiming most recent work as new and original will not be acceptable’. Self-citations do not add any numbers to the individual’s citation index or h-index in global academia, it added.

Breaking up a longer or larger study into smaller sections and publishing them as altogether new, reusing data already used are some of the wrongdoings under self-plagiarism caught by UGC, which will not be accepted henceforth. The UGC had informed that it will soon release a set of parameters to evaluate instances of self-plagiarism or recycling of text soon.

In 2018, UGC had issued strict guidelines under which plagiarism of up to 40 per cent, students and teachers will be asked to resubmit the content. For plagiarism between 40-60 per cent, students will be debarred from submitting paper for another year and teachers will not be allowed to supervise new masters, MPhil and PhD class for two years. If more than 60 per cent of the content is plagiarised, then students’ registration can be canceled and faculty members will be suspended, even dismissed.